Why Christianity became popular | Yuval Noah Harari and Lex Fridman:
If I understand Yuval Harari he argues that humans are storytellers and our behavior seems to be dominated or influenced strongly by the internalized stories of various human groups, tribes, or nations. In this video Harari asks why people believe one story and not another? He speculates a good deal about counter-factual possibilities for the path of history.
Harari: Stories are independent forces. Now why do people believe one story and not another? That's history! There is no materialistic law ... No! History is full of accidents! How did Christianity become the most successful religion in the world? We can't explain it. ... Thousands of different stories competing. Why did Christianity come out on top? As a historian I don't have a clear answer. You can read the sources and you see how it happened. ... But why? If you rewind history and press play ... I think Christianity would have taken over the Roman Empire and the world maybe twice in one hundred times. It is such an unlikely thing to happen. It is the same with Islam. It is the same with the Communist takeover of Russia.
Fridman: And it is perhaps tempting to tell some of that history through charismatic leaders. And maybe it's an open question how much power charismatic leaders have to effect the trajectory of history?
Harari: You've met quite a lot of charismatic leaders lately I mean what is your view on that?
Fridman: I find it a compelling notion. I'm a sucker for a great speech and a vision. So I have a sense that there is an importance for a leader to catalyze the viral spread of a story. So I think we just need leaders to be great storytellers. That kind of sharpen up the story. To make sure it infiltrates everybody's brain effectively. But it could also be that the local interaction between human beings is even more important. We just don't have a good way to summarize and describe that. We like to talk about Steve Jobs, Bill Gates, as central to the development of computers. You like to talk about individuals like this because it's easier to tell a sexy story that way.
Harari: Maybe it's an interaction. [Paraphrasing - If Columbus did not discover the New World then someone else soon would have.] But the thing about history is these small difference matter. Maybe if someone from England discovered the New World then South America would speak English instead of Spanish.
My take is that Fridman is expressing at least one feature of human psychology which can in part explain why some stories told and/or propagated by charismatic leaders are more compelling and persistent than others over time in human history. Harari is expressing the highly speculative yet valid concepts of counter-factual reasoning about events and the butterfly effect from scientific models where small changes in initial conditions generate widely divergent evolutionary paths of a chaotic mathematical system. But chaos and complexity theories have the concept of attractor patterns which are more likely than other non-attractor paths.
I notice that in many philosophical, political, and economic debates there is always a counter-factual scenario compared to the facts in evidence. Or like lawyers in court we apply different narratives to the same facts. Do any philosophers propose theories to explain why there is a particular pattern of drama (dramatic attractor theory) in the path of historical events?